GERMS PLANTED BY TIGHT LACING

“Dr. Nicholas Senn brought back from Africa,
from whence he returned to Chicago yesterday, confirmations
of his belief that cancer is a ‘civilized’
disease.

“Dr. Senn spent from $2,000 to $3,000 worth
of time—­at the cash value per hour of his
time on his first day at home for four months, telling
a half dozen newspaper men more than all the world,
except himself and a score of specialists like him,
know about the fearful disease. He summed up
his own learning in the statement that the disease
is still incurable except by the knife in its incipient
stages and that the best preventive is clean, plain
living.

“His investigations of the natives of Africa
served to strengthen his conviction that cancer is
a product of civilization, ’like apoplexy and
scores of other exotic ailments,’ Dr. Senn said.
He could not find or hear of a case of cancer among
the ‘Hamites,’ as he termed them.
And from the fact that he found the disease, to be
an unknown one to the Esquimaux of Greenland, he is
assured that climate has nothing whatever to do with
it. Climate did not cause it, and climate will
not cure it.”

Cancer Caused by Over-Living

“’The nearer the human race approaches
the animals in habits and particularly in the matter
of diet and dress, the freer it is from cancer,’
he said. ’Cancer comes from over-feeding
and over-living.

“’Drinking, gourmandizing, unnatural habits
of women, like lacing, all those things help to plant
the seeds of cancer in the child.

“’And as we have not learned to cure it
the best thing to do is to prevent it when we can.
If children were brought up in simplicity by natural
mothers; then, if care should be taken to prevent
hypernutrition, there would be much less danger from
cancer. Cancer itself is an over-fed thing—­tissue
that never matures, for if I could mature the cells
I could cure the disease. The thing for people
to do who fear they may have inherited it, is to live
simply—­there are many cases among people
with a tendency to obesity to one among those of a
scanty habit of living—­and particularly
to remove all sources of irritation, like bad teeth,
tobacco, and clothes that chafe.’”

Studies African Race

“Besides his hobby, as he calls it, Dr. Senn
studied the African generally in his voyage along
the East Coast of that continent.

“‘It was a fine trip,’ he said,
’with so many things to learn. Ethnologically
I am certain Africans are of common stock. The
negro is a negro wherever you find him. From
Kaffir to Bushman and pygmy they are all Hamites.

“’They are mostly a fine people physically,
lean and tall, except the dwarfs. There is little
tendency toward obesity; they have no apoplexy, no
distended veins as we have in civilization. Hence
their freedom from cancer. They live naturally,
and are vegetarians mostly, while the Northern Esquimaux
are meat-eaters, but both races eat naturally to sustain
life, hence their immunity from that disease.
It is where eating is made an art that cancer is most
prevalent.